The Peace Thieves
by BakerWho
Summary: All Grace wanted was a newspaper. She didn't want some strange man waving a wand at her. She certainly didn't want him turning up at her office with a blonde and a fake ID. But what this man - this Doctor - has to show Grace will turn her world upside down. Because Grace is about to meet the Peace Thieves. And if she doesn't stop them, they'll take her for everything she has.
1. Chapter 1

It was a perfectly crisp London morning, as if all the air in the city had been scrubbed clean and hung out to dry. People on their way to school or shopping or work or brunch surged along the footpaths like blood cells through an artery. Many of them relished this time of day, feeling charged by it with a sense of purpose as potent and invigorating as oxygen itself.

But not Grace Kwan.

By the time Grace had descended the steps outside her apartment block in Brixton, she was barely running on time for work and already exhausted after another night of too little sleep. And yet Grace, as she tugged her trench-coat tighter around her small frame and tied back her shoulder-length black hair, could not help stopping short at the sight of a man in vintage driving goggles waving a buzzing, blue-tipped wand over a rack of newspapers.

He didn't look much like a wizard, at least not any kind that Grace had read about, which was quite a few. With his leather jacket, close-cropped hair and strong-featured face, he seemed more likely to throw Harry Potter out of a nightclub than teach him about potions, but he had an air of authority about him that seemed to be warding off any second glances from passers-by.

Grace edged towards him. She wanted one of those newspapers. She got one every week and she was damned if she'd let another part of her morning routine slide today, slightly-scary-street-wizard or not.

She cleared her throat. "Excuse me? Can I get one of those?"

The man turned to look at her. Sunlight refracted strangely off the lenses of his goggles, like it was trying to be three colours at once. The wand stopped buzzing as he raised it out of her way. "Sure. It's a free paper," he said with a Mancunian lilt.

Grace took a paper off the top of the stack and tucked it under her arm. The wizardish man leapt back like he'd caught his finger in a mousetrap.

"Hey! How'd you do that?" He demanded. He lifted the goggles onto his forehead, revealing blue eyes open wide.

What on Earth was he on about? Grace performed some fast mental calculus to work out the safest, vaguest answer she could give without sounding patronising. "Umm. Just a fluke, I suppose?"

The man lowered the goggles over his eyes, buzzed the wand at her a couple of times, then raised the goggles again. Now he looked concerned. "Let me guess," he said slowly. "It's been four weeks since you had a decent night's sleep?"

Grace froze. There was no way he could have told from looking at her - her make-up always covered the circles under her eyes flawlessly. Could he be a stalker? No, even a stalker wouldn't know about the hours she'd spent lying awake in the dark every night for the last month. There was no explanation - or at least, no rational explanation.

Oh God, thought Grace, slightly giddy with panic. He really _is_ a wizard.

The man noticed her reaction and held up an index finger. "Now, hang on," he cautioned, "I'm usually all in favour of running away, but…"

"I have to late, I'm go for work!" Grace blurted, stumbling backwards into the bonnet of a parked van. She spun around as she bounced off and hurried away as fast as her brogues would carry her, for once grateful for a crowd to lose herself in. I'm just going to forget that happened, she promised herself, keeping her eyes down and her shoulders up. I forget things all the time, it'll be easy. All I need to do is never, ever see that man again.


	2. Chapter 2

"Grace, you're here!" Clyde, Grace's team leader, grinned broadly across the open-plan office as she hurried over to her desk and turned her computer on. _I know you're late_ , he meant, _but not late enough for me to get you in trouble_. From the desk opposite hers, Brigitte gave Grace one of her famously expressive eye-rolls from beneath a mountain of blonde curls. Despite everything, Grace had to struggle to suppress a laugh. At least she wasn't on her own when it came to Clyde. Every person on the team loathed him. If only he were honest about being petulant, vindictive and self-serving, he would have been bearable, but no - he had douse everything he said in false cheer, the same way he doused his twiggy body in spray-on deodorant and hair gel. Yuck.

Grace folded her jacket over the back of her chair, stowed her handbag and newspaper under her desk, then sat down and turned on her computer. As she opened her schedule for the day, she felt her stomach twist into a knot. Just looking at the long list of tasks she had ahead of her was enough to fill her with despair at ever completing them all, a feeling only deepened by the merry clatter coming from Brigitte's keyboard - the sound of another piece of wrinkled code being steamrolled flat. How does she do it? Grace wondered. She's always so productive, and somehow she still has time for all that volunteering outside of work. I wish I could have her energy. Or have her legs. Or have her over for dinner…

Just as Grace was drifting off into a work-inappropriate daydream, Brigitte kicked her foot under the desk - the agreed-upon 'Clyde signal'. Grace instantly snapped back to reality, banging her knee on a drawer as she hurried to sit up straight.

"Subtle," Brigitte muttered.

Grace had exactly enough time to open a spreadsheet and start moving random numbers around before Clyde arrived behind her.

"Wow! Those figures are looking good, Grace," he said, peering over her shoulder. Clyde's one redeeming quality was that he was too insecure to admit he had no idea how her job worked. "You're really stepping up to your new responsibilities! But listen, why don't we move that to the back burner for now? Put a pin in it? There's someone here from head office who wants to meet you."

Grace swivelled around in her chair. A tiny, paranoid part of her was expecting to see the man from the street standing there wearing some ridiculous fake badge, so she was relieved to instead be greeted by the sight of a young, friendly-looking blonde woman in a sky-blue business suit.

"Hello," said the woman, speaking with a vaguely posh accent. "You must be Grace."

Grace stood up to shake her hand. "That's right, Grace Kwan. It's a pleasure to meet you, Ms…?"

"Tyler." The woman smiled modestly. "But please - call me Rose."


	3. Chapter 3

As Rose ushered Grace into the daylight-filled meeting-room overlooking central London, the room's only other occupant looked up from the big oval table, where he sat stirring a mug of tea, and waved.

"Hello Grace!" said the lunatic from the street. "I didn't get the chance to introduce myself before. I'm the Doctor."

Grace stopped in the doorway and massaged her temples with her fingertips. "No. No no no," she groaned. "I don't have the energy for this today."

"I'm not surprised, the way you've been sleeping lately," said the Doctor.

"Alright, that was an actually, properly creepy thing to say." Rose brushed past Grace, sat down beside the Doctor and picked up the mug. The posh accent she'd been affecting had apparently vanished. "Like, if I didn't know you, I'd have maced you by now."

"What? I'm trying to be honest with her! Better honesty than that Maggie Smith impression of yours."

Rose winced and took a sip of the tea. "It was a bit rubbish, wasn't it?"

"Next stop after this, we're getting you some acting lessons. I think Laurence Olivier still owes me a favour for finding his cat."

Grace decided she had had enough. "Who. Are. You?" She demanded, clapping her hands to emphasise each word. "And why should I not call security right now?"

The Doctor rose from his chair and walked over to Grace. "I really am the Doctor, and she really is Rose Tyler." He pulled a leather wallet out of his jacket and flipped it open, revealing some sort of ID card. "And this should explain the rest."

Grace read the card with a growing mixture of surprise and relief. It actually did explain almost everything that had happened so far.

"Wow!" She marvelled. "So "The Doctor" is your stage name, then? What's it like working for Derren Brown?"

Rose coughed suddenly, splashing tea everywhere.

"Napkins are on the sideboard," the Doctor said without turning around.

"Went down the wrong way. Sorry."

The Doctor put the wallet back in his jacket and gestured towards the table. "While my glamorous assistant is drying herself off, would you like to take a seat?" He gave a charming grin. "Give me just five minutes, Grace, and I can change your life."


	4. Chapter 4

Grace felt a little of her previous trepidation returning as she seated herself on the side of the table opposite to the the Doctor and Rose. She didn't think she was in any danger, but there were still some things that didn't quite add up. Like, shouldn't there be cameras, if all this was for a TV show on mentalism? And hadn't Laurence Olivier died about twenty years ago?

"You meant what you said about 'five minutes', right?" she asked. The Doctor was rummaging for something under his side of the table while Rose threw the last tea-soaked serviette into a waste basket. "Because I've got a really full schedule today, so I can't afford to…"

The Doctor emerged holding a bizarre contraption, which he plonked down in the middle of the table. It looked to Grace like a birdcage made of glow-sticks and fibre-optic cable. Though whatever-it-was appeared to be empty, it continued to rattle ominously even after the Doctor had taken his hand off it.

"Nothing up my sleeves," said the Doctor, tugging at the cuffs of his jacket. He was enjoying himself. Rose shot Grace a sympathetic glance, though she was obviously having just as much fun as he was.

He gripped the handle on top of the cage with a flourish. "Now, Ms. Kwan," he announced, "watch as I make your woefully limited world view… disappear!" He turned the handle, and the bars of the cage shifted, crossing each other at new angles so that…

A _creature_ appeared within.

"Whoa!" Grace leapt up and back from the table, knocking her chair over, but despite her shock she couldn't take her eyes off the thing in the cage. It was translucent green, about half a metre long, and looked something like a cross between a stingray and a silverfish. Despite its size, it appeared to float in air as though it were water. As she watched, the thing bumped its head against the cage bars, and the whole enclosure rattled again.

"Meet the _pax-klefti_ ," said the Doctor, sitting back down. "Or one of them, anyway."

Grace righted her chair and made herself look at the apparition - the _pax-klefti -_ more closely. It was definitely three-dimensional, but there were no screens in the cage - and last time Grace had checked, no one had invented holograms yet.

"It's an alien!" she whispered.

Rose's face lit up. "Oh, she's good!"

"She's wrong," said the Doctor. Rose slapped his arm. "Ow! Alright, it's not a bad guess, I suppose. The _pax-klefti_ aren't aliens, though. They've always been around on Earth, they just go unnoticed most of the time. They exist in a sort of membrane dimension wrapped around this one. Intangible and invisible unless," he tapped the glowing bars of the cage, "they're exposed to a very specific combination of light frequencies. The name _pax-klefti_ means "peace thieves", by the way, though they're usually not quite as bad as that makes them sound."

Grace took a long, deep breath and let it out. "You two don't really work for Derren Brown, do you?"

The Doctor shook his head. "Freelancers."

"Same line of work, though, more or less," added Rose.

Grace looked again at the caged creature _._ It had no eyes that she could see, but from the way it nudged the bars on her side of the cage, it seemed to be interested in her.

"Why 'peace thieves'?" she asked.

The Doctor and Rose glanced at each other. "Better if I show you," said the Doctor.


	5. Chapter 5

The Doctor stood up from the table, motioning Grace and Rose over to the meeting room's north-facing window. Once they had joined him there he pulled a pair of goggles out of his jacket and handed them to Grace. They appeared to be the same ones she'd seen him wearing earlier that morning.

"Transdimensionally polarised lenses," the Doctor said. "Same principle as the bars of the cage. Go on, put them on."

Grace held the goggles up to her face, hesitating. The Doctor's words from earlier echoed through her mind: _Give me just five minutes and I can change your life._

She put them on.

The lenses subtly shifted the colours of the room, making some shades brighter and some duller. The captive _pax-klefti_ looked the same, but the bars of its cage were now jet-black. Tightening the straps on the goggles, Grace turned to Rose and the Doctor and started a little at what she saw.

"Rose!" she gasped. "There's… you have an aura!" Tendrils of blue light surrounded the young woman's head like a soft flame.

"Really? What's it look like?" Rose pulled her hair back over her shoulders, preening slightly.

"Blue flames," said the Doctor impatiently. "It always looks like blue flames. It's just psychic bleed-off, you can't read emotions or tell fortunes from it or anything."

Grace frowned. "You don't have one at all, Doctor."

"I'm on a different wavelength. Now, look out the window, tell me what you see in the street down there."

Grace looked down to the street below. Though the morning rush was ebbing away, there were still scores of people on the move, stepping in and out of shops, jostling across and around each other and darting through the traffic whenever it slowed to stop. Their mingling auras, seen through the lenses of the goggles, reminded Grace of luminescent plankton on an ocean swell.

But humans were not the only creatures visible.

"There's more _pax-klefti_ down there," she said. "Swimming in the air just above head height. Two, maybe three of them, it's hard to say. They go through walls and buses like they're not even there."

"Keep watching," said the Doctor.

One _pax-klefti_ emerged through the wall of a menswear store and paused for a moment, as if sniffing the air. Then, with alarming speed, it darted down and affixed itself to the head of a young man who happened to be walking past.

"My God, it's biting him!" Grace cried, pointing towards the _pax-klefti'_ s victim. "The guy in the jeans and brown hoodie, on the corner there!"

"He'll be alright," said the Doctor. "Keep watching."

The _pax-klefti_ stayed on the man's head for about five seconds, waves of blue light pulsing down the centre of its back, before detaching itself and drifting away. The man walked on, apparently unaware of what had just happened.

"Wait for it," said the Doctor.

As he reached the corner the man started to turn left, then stopped, scratched his head, and turned right instead.

"There you go!" said the Doctor happily. "Ten seconds and he's already made a complete recovery!"

Grace turned back to the Doctor, her mind spinning so fast she forgot she was still wearing the goggles. "What did I just see?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Everyone's got to eat, Grace. Some creatures get energy by breaking down chemicals in food. The _pax-klefti_ get theirs by breaking down thoughts."

Rose shuddered. "Brain suckers. I _hate_ brain suckers."

"They don't suck brains!" The Doctor rolled his eyes. "They don't even suck whole minds, just individual thoughts. A single bite from a _pax-klefti_ is no worse than a mosquito bite, usually."

Grace felt she was beginning to understand. "That's why that man forgot which way he was walking."

The Doctor nodded. "Thing is though, you know how mosquitos tend to prefer some people over others? Well, the _pax-klefti_ have their favourites too." His face darkened. "One bite now and then is no big deal. You might lose a train of thought, or say the wrong word in a conversation. But if they keep feeding on you all the time…"

Rose put her hand over her mouth. "My God, you'd go mad."

"In the worst cases."

"So they're… are they where mental illness comes from?" Grace asked.

"Not on their own, not by a long shot," the Doctor said. "Maybe one case in a thousand is completely their fault. More often they just make a bad situation slightly worse."

"One in a thousand is more than enough." Grace shivered as she had an unpleasant thought. "Doctor, I … I have that kind of illness, myself. I always have. Is that why you're showing me all this? Am I one of the _pax-klefti's_ favourites?"

The Doctor didn't answer. Instead, he resumed his seat at the table and rested his head on the palm of one hand, staring at the captive parasite _._ "Rose and I, we have this machine called a TARDIS. We travel in it, but it also detects when strange things are happening."

"Yeah, and then it lands us right on top of them," Rose muttered, leaning in the corner.

"A little while ago, our TARDIS detected a surge in _pax-klefti_ activity around here, so we came to see what had caused it. That's what I was doing when we first met, Grace. For some reason the _pax-klefti_ like to leave their, well, their leavings on newspaper stands, so I was trying to gage their local population by measuring the quality of coverage. No pun intended."

Grace tried not to think of all the times she had eaten her lunch off one of those papers.

The Doctor rested his free hand on top of the cage. "One of these fellas happened to be swimming down to pay a visit when you came for your paper. And when it saw you…"

"What?" Grace leaned forward on the table. The Doctor seemed reluctant to tell her, but she had to know. "It fed on me? It laid eggs? What happened?"

"This," said the Doctor, and with one movement he opened the top of the cage and flung the _pax-klefti_ inside towards her face.


	6. Chapter 6

Grace did her very best to get through the rest of the day normally, chatting with Brigitte and answering e-mails as if everything was the same, as if her whole world hadn't been turned upside down. After all, that was how she'd always dealt with her depression: by hiding it. Through years of carefully rationing willpower and energy, she had created a convincing façade of a healthy, happy woman in her late twenties. And if all she ever did outside of work was eat and lay in bed, then that was simply the price she had to pay for being treated like a whole person, instead of an invalid or a malingering layabout. Many people didn't have that choice, she reminded herself. Many had to wear their weaknesses on the outside, whether they wanted to or not. She was one of the lucky ones.

But this was not an ordinary day with ordinary demands, and Grace was only human. It was, in hindsight, a completely unsurprising surprise when she burst into tears in the stationery cupboard just after lunch.

Why are there never the right size staples? she demanded inside her head, sinking to the floor and hugging her knees and trying to at least not actually sob out loud. She could have brought her own staples, she always meant to bring her own, but she never remembered to look for them when she was at the shops. What was she supposed to do now, use paperclips? Hadn't she done enough harm already?

"Grace?" Brigitte's voice came from behind and above her. "Is that - oh, shit!"

Grace heard Brigitte close the door of the cupboard and sit down on the floor next beside her, her numerous silver bracelets jingling. Grace wanted to respond but her body felt like a car stalled in the middle of a busy intersection.

"What's wrong, Grace?" Brigitte asked. Her tone grew threatening. "Was it something Clyde did?"

Grace managed to shake her head.

Brigitte sighed. "Well, since we're in here, maybe we should get some staple removers and scratch up the paint on his car anyway."

Grace laughed, barely. Brigitte said nothing more, but simply put her hand on her friend's shoulder and waited until she was ready to talk.

How do I even begin to tell her? Grace wondered. I know it was real, I'm not _that_ kind of crazy, and aliens did kill half the government a while ago so everyone knows _they're_ real. But this…

Grace looked up at Brigitte's face - kind, patient, ridiculously pretty - and decided to do her best.

"There are these…" The image of the _pax-klefti_ appeared vividly in her mind's eye. "Problems. A lot of people have them, and they're usually not that bad on their own, just another part of life. But they affect me differently."

She closed her eyes for a moment and saw it all play out again. The _pax-klefti_ surging greedily from the open cage towards her head. The Doctor and Rose's frozen faces: his halfway between determination and pity, hers a mask of pure disbelief. And then the ribbon of energy leaping from the centre of her own forehead like a lightning bolt, instantly reducing the _pax-klefti_ to a handful of luminous ashes.

"My brain deals with these problems in a way that takes a lot out of me," Grace continued. "It always has. It doesn't leave me with a lot of capacity for dealing with anything else, but I've always made do with what I had."

"Until you took on these extra responsibilities at work last month and stopped sleeping properly." Brigitte turned slightly pink and averted her gaze. "Don't look so shocked, I sit right across from you. Your concealer technique is excellent but you've been yawning non-stop for weeks."

Damn it, Grace thought. "Well, yeah. And because I haven't been sleeping, my brain hasn't had the energy to zap - I mean, deal with these problems like it used to, so their numbers have just been building up and building up. And now this - this Doctor has offered to give me something that can stop these problems from bothering me so much. It's a chance to be normal. But it scares me, I think maybe it just as much as staying as I am. I don't know what I'm supposed to do! Oh, this all sounds nuts, doesn't it?"

Brigitte didn't reply at first. She just rolled up the sleeve on her left arm, revealing scores of horizontal pink scars. Grace's mouth fell open.

"You know how I changed high-schools when I was fifteen?" Brigitte said. "Well, I saw a therapist about it eventually, but for about three months after the move I was cutting myself nearly every day." She twirled one finger through her blonde curls. "I didn't know why, I just felt like I had to. But in the end I decided I needed to tell someone, because no good was going to come from going on the way I was." She smiled crookedly. "I thought I sounded pretty nuts trying to explain to my Mum why I couldn't wear the tank-tops she got me for Christmas. And where the blood stains on my bathrobe had come from. But when she nearly cracked a rib hugging me I knew I'd made perfect sense."

Brigitte leaned over and planted a kiss on Grace's forehead. "And so do you."

She sat back. "Grace, I can't tell you what the right choice is for you. All I know is that picking the least scary option isn't the right way to choose. You've already been brave a million times, coming to work every day with all this on your shoulders. Just be brave once more. Whatever you decide, I've got your back."

Grace wanted to look into Brigitte's eyes and thank her, but she was still transfixed by the scars on her friend's arm. How many of those are because of _pax-klefti_? She wondered, and felt something entirely new begin to grow within her chest.

"Okay, here's the plan," Grace said, standing up suddenly and bumping a shelf of printer paper. "First, I'm going to the bathroom to clean myself up. Then I'm leaving for the day - Doctor's appointment, he said he could fit me in early. You can cover for me with Clyde, right?"

"Um, yeah, of course." Brigitte rolled her sleeve back down as she climbed to her feet, looking confused but not unhappy about Grace's abrupt change in mood.

"Then I'm going home, sleeping for about thirty thousand years, and actually getting up on time tomorrow morning." She took a deep breath. "And then tomorrow night you and I are going on a date."

Brigitte's mouth opened and closed a few times - then she grinned so widely that Grace thought the top half of her head would fall off.


	7. Chapter 7

"Come in, Grace. You're not interrupting." The Doctor's eyes opened as she peered through the barely-open door to the meeting room. He was alone, sitting in the lotus position on the edge of the oval table. As Grace entered, he unfolded his legs to the floor and stood up. "Finished my mental preparations earlier than I thought," he said, tapping the side of his head. "I've been passing the time since then doing cryptic crosswords from magazines I've flicked through over the years. What do you make of 'Dab flow of mixed-up mean dog'?"

Grace thought for a moment. "'Bad wolf'?"

"Nah, couldn't be," said the Doctor. Then he frowned. "Well, maybe. But then nine down would have to change."

Grace looked around the room. "From her absence, I take it Rose is still cross with you?"

The Doctor shifted uncomfortably. "After throwing that _pax-klefti_ at you, I'm not exactly in her good books." He made himself look Grace in the eye. "I'm sorry if I frightened you, before. I've been doing what I do for so long, sometimes I forget what it's like to see these things for the first time."

Grace found herself smiling. "Well, it wasn't the nicest surprise in the world. But I had to see it happen for myself, one way or another. I suppose it's better you got it over with quickly."

"Yeah, try telling Rose that." The Doctor rubbed his hands together. "Anyway, speaking of getting things over with: I'm ready when you are."

Grace swallowed. No point in putting it off. "Okay. So how does this work?"

"Not much to it, from your end. I'll touch the sides of your head for about ten, fifteen seconds and re-tune you to a different psychic frequency. That's all. You'll still feel the same and think the same."

"I just won't be a human bug-zapper any more."

"Your words, not mine," the Doctor chuckled. "But yeah. You'll still get the occasional _pax-klefti_ bite, but no more than anyone else. That means a lot more energy left for living your own life." The Doctor lifted his hands, palms turned inwards. "Ready?"

"I'm ready." The Doctor reached towards Grace's head, and with more certainty than she had felt about anything in recent memory, she added, "To stay as I am."

The Doctor's hands stopped, then lowered to his sides. He squinted at her. "You what? Why?"

"You know why. The thing that brought you and Rose here, that surge in _pax-klefti_ activity your machine detected - that was just their population returning to normal, right? That's what you told me. But I'm the reason it was lower than normal in the first place!" Grace paused for air. She felt slightly breathless, though in a good way. "And once I rearrange my life a bit so that I can sleep properly and stop walking around with an undercharged brain, I'm going to be that reason again."

The Doctor was incredulous. "Grace, you can't be serious! Do you know what that will mean? You'll be fighting the _pax-klefti_ for the rest of your life! That's a lifetime of struggle, a lifetime of running on fumes, dragging yourself from one end of each day to the other by your fingernails. Why would you do that to yourself?"

"Because they don't know why!" Grace blurted. "All those other people out there that the _pax-klefti_ feed on, having their thoughts eaten, their - their peace stolen, they don't even know it's happening! They don't know why they are the way that they are." She blinked away her tears. Enough crying today, she told herself. "They don't know that they're being eaten alive by these invisible monsters. So they blame themselves instead, and that rips them up from the inside, worse than the _pax-klefti_ ever could. Those people - people like me - they deserve better. They deserve a chance to be happier, even if it's only a little happier. And if I have the power to give them that chance, then I have to do it."

The Doctor stared at her. "You deserve that chance, too."

Grace nodded. "Yes, I do. And this is me taking it, because I can."

The Doctor shook his head and sighed, staring out the meeting room window as the sun set over London. "Humans," he said, making it sound like such a heavy word.

"Alright then, Grace Kwan," he continued after a moment. "But if that's your final decision, then there's one more thing I have to do before I go." He hesitated. "You can't ever tell anyone I did this."

Grace blinked, having no idea what to expect after everything else that had happened that day. "Did what?"

The Doctor stood up straight, snapped his right arm to his forehead, held it there, then swung it back down again. A flawless salute.

"From one old soldier to another," he said, and before Grace could reply he walked past her and out of the door.

 _The End_


End file.
